Warm up -

Air hockey with cones. 2 participants for each grid will be in a push up position (using knees if needed) and will be between 2 cones which are positioned on either side of their hands. Participants will use a designated cone (the air hockey) and try score by passing it passed the opposing participants side without going outside the side boundary’s.

Players

• soft room

• Obstacle course

• Exploring the movement of squatting and the depth

Session review

Player needs - players in this session needed constant guidance on what to do in activities rather than trying to adapt it themselves and carrying on to engage.

This was my first time leading a gym session, and honestly it was a learning curve. I hadn’t done enough planning before hand, which I resulted in activities taking longer to set up and transitions becoming slow. Their meant that the year 8s spent too long on certain activities and weren’t as engaged as id hoped.

Looking back at this session, i can see that clearer preparation and anticipating participant needs would have made a big difference. For future sessions, i will plan with more intention, considering not what activities to use, but why I’m using them. I will also aim to reflect more regularly during the session itself so i can make live adjustments based on how participants are reacting to my sessions.

• Some students are reluctant to engage in activities they are unfamiliar with and prefer sports they already enjoy, such as rugby or football.

• Introducing familiar elements like “Star Wars” can increase their participation and make students feel more comfortable.

• Building trust and communication between the coach and students helps improved engagement's.

Sense of belonging

• Some people feel lost when their friends weren’t participating, showing that peer presence significantly affects engagement.

• Students need an environment where they can interact with their peers while still being challenged, rather than simply being allowed to follow friends without structure.

Psychological safety

• Some students feel more comfortable in familiar or low pressure environments and struggle with main group activities

• Gradual exposure to challenges helped them build confidence and engage more fully

• Grouping students by similar skills levels, although often meant it was a weaker team, helped improve engagement and ensure they felt physically and socially safe.

Barriers to participation

• Lack of motivation and disengagement happens when students don’t see instant progress

• Students without peer encouragement struggle to stay engaged

Session structure

• Activities that don’t align with student expectation can lead to disengagement and boredom, like when students became uninterested when they were moved into the main gym rather than where all the activity was in the soft room

• Ensuring all transition between activities are engaging is essential and align with students needs helps maintain the focus you built initially and prevents them going off track to disrupt lesson time

Meesogoal - Improve students basic knowledge and skills, showing an growing improvement when teaching them

Macro goal - to develop students into participants who want to actively engage in session and want to further develop their skills.

Body weight core movements

Session plan

Stop teammate

standing up, putting on back

Race with teammate

Wheel barrow, carrying on back, bear crawls

Gladiator style game where 2 Teams each on a mat and they have to push each other off, last team standing wins. Engaging core movements of pushing and balancing

Set up workout stations with system of points of some sort (body weight)

• pull up

• Push up

• Plank

• Etc

Set up with a points based system to introduce friendly competition and give students measurable goals related to body weight strength and endurance.

Review

Player needs - i found in this session players needed constant engagement, otherwise they would start to do their own thing. I also found that players would feel the need to make castles out of objects they found in the room. This also shows the need for certain individuals to hide away from the activities and separate themselves from the session.

Compared to our first gym session, this one showed much more improvement. Starting with the gladiator style game was effective as it got students moving straight away, reduced the downtime at the beginning, and required very little explanation. It also allowed students who arrived late to jump in easily by copying their mates.

Although we didn’t move into the other planned activities, I adapted the session in response to student engagement. I extended the gladiator game, adapting it to include more core based movements and added side challenges for students who disengaged from the main activity. This flexibility kept the session flowing and allowed us to respond in real time to how the students were behaving and participating.

In future sessions, I aimed to improve my ability to set up multiple activities in advance. This will help maintain engagement and allow smoother transitions between tasks.

Netball with cones - same rules as normal netball, but there is no net and instead a few sets of cones set out in the shape of a small square in an area, where teams can score by passing the ball to their teammates who are in these set cones. In order for the defending team to get the ball they must simply intercept the ball and then immediately start attacking and can pass to teammates.

Main session

Gym stations - there will be 5 stations matching the amount of students we are working with as they will be in pairs for each exercise.

The 5 different stations will be working upper body pushing movements by doing a throwing movement with a heavy ball, upper body pulling movements doing banded pull ups, explosive power in legs from box jumps, endurance from farmers carries and a squatting movement from doing overhead squats.

These all are very valuable in the gym and all lead into different activities in the sporting world and to benefit each individual sport in its own way.

Review

Player needs - i found in this session, students were getting fed up of being in the gym and needed some space to run around and loose more energy. This was challenging to deal with in the session as they were constantly asking to go outside so i think that’s definitely something ill be doing in the next session.

I delivered this session in the gym and I managed to finish all activities in good time.

What I did well in this session was keeping the year 8s engaged in there activities and having a session plan prepared before I entered the gym.

Things that I did not do so well was my speed of setting up activities to quickly move the year 8s into the next exercise. I think I also could have started with a less energy warm up and then going into high energy main session instead of the other way round.

things I will change for next time is preparing my session plan in an order of energy and engagement levels, I would also have things set up and prepared in more time to reduce any delay of any waiting or too much time on any given activity.

Chicken or hero style game where one or two players start without a ball. The rest of the players have a ball and must dribble across the field without losing their ball. If their ball is stolen they join the people that are on.

Main session

10-15 minute match splitting the group into 2 even teams. Will be a normal game a of football for a fun last part of the session and if one team is showing more strength than the other, then we can add in restraints such as a minimum amount of passes to ensure the teams are balanced, everyone is included and the game is challenging for both teams.

Ideas

Traffic jam. Players in a small area going in round the area like a roundabout dribbling a ball, trying not to collide with each other while i call out commands. “1” stop with the ball, “2” carry on dribbling with the ball, “3” change direction.

Review

Player needs - Players in this session are in need of each other as they couldn’t really engage in activities that didn’t involve their friends joining in

Chicken or hero - limited numbers made it hard to carry out this warm up for a good amount of time and therefore had to quickly move onto next activity.

2 teams, numbers - teams were spilt up into 2 even teams, each player being given a number, when i shout out their numbers they run out and try score before the opposing team does. This engaged the group very quickly and i could spend much more time on this as students didn’t show signs of boredom and instead showed competitiveness and wanting to keep playing.

Mini football game - limited numbers made game boring quickly so had to change it up into a session where all players would engage and feel comfortable doing

Netball with football - this is the activity we changed it to when the mini football game got boring. This engaged everyone in the session, even students who don’t usually like to get involved as much performed very well in this activity. This was much better as the boys and girls both felt comfortable in doing sports that they know and engaged very well. We did this activity all the way to the end of the session as everyone enjoyed this and was very competitive and no students were disengaged

What i would improve for next session is better knowledge and adaptablility with students that i have. What i mean is not trial and erroring activities and instead implementing activities that i know they would all love and enjoy so i can keep a smooth transition and no disengagments

For the warm up we will start with a simple game of chicken or hero to quickly energise them and smoothly get them into an activity while we are waiting for all the students to arrive. We can also add constraints like, players running while dribbling the ball and the person who is on tackling students to get them out, or the person who is on dribbling the ball and tagging players with it

Main session

Divide players into two teams and number each player from each team. The coach will then call out a number and the players that have that number from each team will reach to the ball in the middle and try to score. Players cannot shoot outside the box and will have to work their way through the opposing team to shoot in a small area. To progress this activity the coach will call more numbers each time to make the players think about passing and looking for moving into space.

After this activity we can smoothly transition this into a fun full game of 5 a side football to grab the full engagement at the end of this session and to integrate skills they practised and adapt them into the game. The coach can be giving positive feedback to players and especially on skills such as space awareness, passing and dribbling as they have just been working on these skills.

Ideas

Divide players into two teams and number each player from each team. The coach will then call out a number and the players that have that number from each team will reach to the ball in the middle and try to score. Players cannot shoot outside the box and will have to work their way through the opposing team to shoot in a small area. To progress this activity the coach will call more numbers each time to make the players think about passing and looking for moving into space.

Dribble relay race - create 2 lines of cones and 2 teams. Students dribble the ball through the cones and when they get to the end, they will pass the ball to the next person in line to go and race back to get to get back in the line. During the activity, the coach can add variations to the drill such as adding something such as calling out “weak foot only” to add make it more difficult and can be used to balance out teams fairness if one team is winning by a lot. This will benefit the players ability to pass and dribble the ball and will also work on players thinking speed.

Review

Player needs - in this session i found certain players needed others to function better and to engage them more. Players struggle to leave their friends when they have to be in their groups and becoming frustrated. Another need in this session was certain individuals needed space and felt the need to hide away from the ball and become disengaged an play on the goal posts.

This session I found was a very difficult session to coach students. This was due to lack of numbers, causing the participants in this session to become disengaged and bored. This caused me to adapt the session to the specific group at the time which was challenging as participants in this group had a variety of different skill and energy levels which made it more or less engaging for certain students.

One way I adapted the session was by putting high energy/skill students on one team and moving more low energy/skill students to another which would make it unfair, however, i added myself and another co coach into the low energy/skill level, and tried our best to keep control of the ball and pass it to these students on our team, trying to engage them in the session best as possible. This also brung out more competitiveness in the high energy team as the game was more fair and fun for them.

Although the lack of numbers and difficulty of the session, i believe i managed it well, involving myself and other coaches into the activities and drill was a very good step to bring out more competitiveness and the best in the students.

Something i could improve in this session was maybe time management. Not as in how long i do certain activities for but how early i have the pitches set up so i can get back up to get the students down earlier as in this session we only had a short amount of time because they took so long to come down. In going up to the top, i have more time and a better idea on the students that ill be coaching and i can be thinking at that time how to adapt the session so i can smoothly transition into activities.

Warm up

Dribble relay - split the group into 2 equal teams. Players must dribble the ball through a series of cones, and when reaching the end of the cones, pass the ball to the next person in line. The idea is first team to have all members dribble through the cone and pass the ball wins

Main session

2 mini games - split the group (depending on groups size) into 4 teams. Have 2 teams in each half of the court, which they have to stay in that half at all times during this activity. Each team will compete against the other to score in the basket ball net. If a team scores, then the new attacking team has to start their attack outside of the 3 point line

Main game - for the final part of the session we will do a full game of 2 teams. The adaptation I’m adding to this game is, if one of the team scores, then that same team has to get behind the half way line. When the whole team crosses behind the half way line, then they can start to push up and defend the ball. This allows the other team to think about what they are doing and get set, also preventing the game being stuck in one part of the court

Review

Basket ball

Player needs - I believe in this session that players don’t understand and have difficulty distinguishing, basketball from netball as i noticed players were sometimes freezing when holding the ball, and not attacking the ball while players are holding it. Another player need in this session was certain students feeling the need to be centre of attention and had to be the one that scored everything. I saw this as some players were shouting for the ball even though their teammate was in clear space to shoot but felt pressured to pass the ball

Dribble relay - started with race, changed it to who can get round all the cones as players weren’t fully executing the drill as they were too focused on racing, so i removed the time race and instead made it a activity where players have to go through all the cones without messing up, causing them to think about their dribbling technique and movement they can bring to the pitch

Piggy in the middle - i added this drill mid session as one of my teachers told me that they needed improvement on passing and dribbling. We split everyone into 3s and designated one person as the person in the middle. I noticed that players were using full access of the pitch so i added in cones to limit there movement so they had to think about passing and dribbling. This made things more difficult for students but definitely caused them to pass more and dribble and move to space

Split group of 12 into 4 teams of 3, where 2 teams each were competing against each other scoring in one net.

Full game of 6 vs 6, smooth transition as we gave players bibs while they were doing the last activity, even teams, rule implemented that if team scored they had to go back to the half way line before they could then defend. This gave attacking players time to think about what they were doing and defenders

This was one of the most engaging sessions so far. The high energy and variety of activities kept the students focused, and i was happy with how well the session flowed. I made real time adjustments, such as altering the dribble relay and piggy in the middle, which showed flexibility in my coaching approach.

Thing that went well in this session was, the sessions was well structured and aligned with the students upcoming basketball tournament, students remained engaged throughout and showed progress in their skills like passing, dribbling, and position, and transitions between activities were efficient, particularly when moving into the final game.

What i would improve in this session is, manage the pace of warm ups to better match the intensity of the full session, and incorporate small objectives that promote inclusive play and discourage ball hogging behaviour.

Engaging students - throughout the 6 sessions I have improved a lot on engaging all students in each session. These sessions bettered my ability to read the room, adjust my approach based on student responses, and introduce new strategies to capture the interest in the session. I learned to use varied teaching methods, doing more visual, verbal and practical demonstrations, to make sure all students were engaged. I did this by doing things such as using me and the co-coach, or another student to demonstrate a summary of the activity which other students found much more helpful for the understanding of the activity

Improving knowledge and skills - I became more confident in delivering information and ensuring that the students understood drills and activities. I introduced more progressively challenging activities, which allowed students to build on their skills from last session. This would be things like passing drills, or tracking back, where students were taught it in one session, and could execute it 10x better in another session as they had time to reflect and i had time to correct them in the first session

Developing engagement and motivation - i learnt to create an environment that encouraged active participation. I also learnt to understand the needs of each student better, making it easier to aid students that are hesitant at first to engage in activities. The variety of activities and strategies i did were successful in encouraging students to actively engage in each session, such as mixing netball with football for the boys and girls. For example, i noticed the girls were getting bored of the football activities, so i adjusted it to use a netball element while still using the football. This lead to a much bigger engagement in the session and participation in the activity.

Engagement in sessions - the students initially did not always engaged with the sessions and got distracted easily, towards the end of the 6 sessions, the students participation levels were much higher from the progression. Using the specific strategies and variety of session also increase the levels of participation. For example, in the gym i struggled to keep the attention of everyone in the class, towards the end of the session i managed to cater the programme specific to the needs of the students and keep it still educational to develop their skills

Improving basic knowledge and skills - the students have a better understanding of the acitvities toward the end of the session and have shown clear progression when participating in these activities. For example when mentioning to students or doing a drill on teamwork, the students next session used it and continued to use more of teamwork without instructions to do so.

Developing engagement and motivation - the students evolved from passive to more active participants throughout the 6 sessions. I’ve seen some more quite student become more active and involved in the sessions after the implementation of things like teamwork, variety of sport, and overall encouragement from teammates and coaches. The feedback from the coaches and students, and the session structure contributed to this progression in developing the session to increase engagement levels.

1. Depth of Reflection:

   • Merit Level Expectation: The reflection should go beyond just summarizing events or actions. Encourage them to explore the why behind their decisions and actions.

   • Actionable Feedback:
     “You’ve done well in detailing your coaching sessions, but try to delve deeper into the reasoning behind your choices. For example, why did you choose a particular drill or approach? Did you adapt based on specific needs or feedback from participants? A more reflective approach will demonstrate your ability to critically evaluate your coaching process.”

2. Application of Theory to Practice:

   • Merit Level Expectation: The student should make clear connections between theoretical concepts and real-world practice in their coaching sessions.

   • Actionable Feedback:
     “You’ve included practical examples, which is great. Now, enhance your analysis by linking these examples to key coaching theories or strategies you’ve studied. For example, when explaining how you adapted your sessions to meet your players' needs, draw on coaching models or frameworks to justify your approach. This will show a stronger theoretical grounding in your coaching practice.”

3. Adapting to Feedback:

   • Merit Level Expectation: Students at merit level should demonstrate an ability to actively seek, respond to, and implement feedback to improve their coaching.

   • Actionable Feedback:
     “It’s important to show how you’ve actively sought feedback from your participants or peers and used that feedback to refine your coaching. If you haven’t already, consider including specific instances where you acted on feedback to adjust your sessions. Demonstrating this will highlight your development as a reflective practitioner.”

4. Inclusion of Multiple Perspectives:

   • Merit Level Expectation: A merit-level student should provide a broader range of feedback, including from different participants (e.g., peers, coaches, players).

   • Actionable Feedback:
     “In your Padlet, try to incorporate perspectives from others involved in your coaching process. This could include feedback from players, fellow coaches, or external observers. Broadening the sources of feedback will show a more holistic approach to your development.”

5. Evidence of Progress:

   • Merit Level Expectation: The coaching padlet should demonstrate a clear trajectory of improvement over time.

   • Actionable Feedback:
     “Ensure your Padlet clearly illustrates the development of your coaching skills. Include specific examples of how you’ve improved from session to session, supported by evidence (e.g., changes in participant performance, your own self-reflections). Showing this progress will elevate your work to the merit level.”

6. Clarity and Structure:

   • Merit Level Expectation: The presentation of the Padlet should be clear, logical, and well-organized.

   • Actionable Feedback:
     “Your Padlet is comprehensive, but make sure it’s well-structured and easy to follow. Consider organizing your reflections by key themes (e.g., coaching style, feedback implementation, player progression) to make your content more accessible and focused.”